That fateful morning “it was raining in a way I had never seen before,” Kenneth says today. Employee

Kenneth Battelle gave Jacqueline Kennedy her tousled bouffant, readied Marilyn Monroe for that famous J.F.K. birthday serenade, and created the chic-est heads at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. After a half-century, New York's master hairdresser is snipping, shaping, and soothing a new generation hotel colon in barcelona of best-tressed women.
Left, by Ron Galella/WireImage; right, from Apic/Getty hotel colon in barcelona Images. CROWNING hotel colon in barcelona GLORY Kenneth, left, bejeweled First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's bouffant for a White House dinner honoring André Malraux, France's minister of culture, May 11, 1962. Right, Jackie with hair by Kenneth, circa 1961.
I n the witching hours of May 16, 1990, a frayed electrical wire—embedded inside a second-story wall of the granite town house at 19 East 54th Street—sizzled and threw off sparks. By 4:51 A.M., when the first alarm rang, this miniature torch had ignited the third floor, and by 5:58, after two more alarms had sounded, 125 firemen from 27 companies were battling a conflagration that was incinerating the entire five-story 1897 structure. Nobody was trapped inside, however, as the palazzo-like building had not been used as a private residence hotel colon in barcelona since its original inhabitant, a Vanderbilt, had moved out in 1917. Since the spring of 1963, it had been occupied hotel colon in barcelona by Kenneth, Manhattan's poshest hair salon—and had served as home away from home for its proprietor, the master hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, and his devoted staff of 100, as well as for his clientele of grandes dames and celebrities, including, over the years, Gloria Vanderbilt, Jacqueline Kennedy, Brooke Astor, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Pamela Harriman, Bunny Mellon, Diana Vreeland, Jayne Wrightsman, Drue Heinz, Babe Paley, Rosalind Russell, Hedda Hopper, Lucille Ball, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe.
That fateful morning "it was raining in a way I had never seen before," Kenneth says today. Employees showing up for work, clients arriving for standing appointments, and longtime customers—alerted by radio and phone—braved the downpour to witness the inferno with Kenneth in woeful disbelief. News of the calamity swept through New York's rival salons, hotel colon in barcelona where rumors sprang up that the fire had been the handiwork of an arsonist. Some competitors even went as far as to send representatives down to 54th Street to poach Kenneth's dispossessed staff. "Nobody hotel colon in barcelona offered me a job," he says. "I do, however, recall a girl from a daily newspaper asking, 'Kenneth, how do you feel right now?' And I replied, 'How the f do you think I feel? Go away!' I mean, how does anyone expect you to 'feel' while you're watching your whole life go up in smoke?"
T he "whole life" of Kenneth Battelle, only son of a traveling troubleshooter for the Nettleton Shoe Company, began in Syracuse, New York, in 1927. When he was 12, Kenneth's parents separated, and his mother turned to her bookish, artistic boy to support her and his four younger sisters. He obliged by washing dishes at the Syracuse railroad station, operating an elevator, short-order cooking, and selling beer at a baseball stadium. "And every chance I got, I attended the movies," he says.
As the movie theater was not quite enough of an escape, at 17 he enlisted in the navy. On leave one day in 1945 just after the war ended, Kenneth was strolling down Park Avenue hotel colon in barcelona in his sailor uniform when "a car suddenly turned a corner," he says. "It was a large, beige Lincoln Cabriolet, with spoked wheels and side-mounted tires, driven by a chauffeur in matching beige livery." The car stopped in front of Louis Sherry's restaurant, and a lady's black, diamond-buckled satin shoe slid through the open door, followed by a slim leg sheathed in black silk hose embellished with clock needlework. Next came a neat, crimped head crowned by a small hat. "A black veil of dotted Swiss lace obscured her face," Kenneth continues, "and she was dressed in a soft black satin suit with a deep, unpressed hotel colon in barcelona hemline. When she stepped onto the pavement and started walking, the bottom of her skirt swished sensually around her legs, and then unwound and wrapped back the opposite way." Back at the base, Kenneth declared breathlessly to a friend, "I have just seen why I have got to move to New York City!"
Allotted funds by the G.I. Bill to attend school for only six months, Kenneth had to jettison his plans to become a psychiatrist. "So when I spotted an ad for a beauty school that read, earn $100 a week in six months , I thought, That's for me," he says.
While enrolled in New York City's Wanamaker Academy of Beauty, on East 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, he moonlighted at Chicken Divan, a restaurant in the East 50s, and played show tunes at a piano bar. After further studies at his hometown's Marinello Academy of Beauty Culture, he found a job at the Starlet Beauty Bar, across the street from Syracuse's Greyhound bus station. "I made up something there called the 'club cut,'" he says—"a Waspy, wavy bob inspired by 30s magazine illustrations." In six months, Kenneth says, "we became the shop in town." Emboldened by this local triumph, but afraid to make New York City his home, in October 1949 he migrated to the hair salon of Miami's Sorrento Hotel. Finally, on July 1, 1950, with $8 in his pocket, he moved to Manhattan, into an apartment above a pair of randy Communists on Third Street between Avenues A and B. Elizabeth Arden offered him a job—"at their branch in Lexington, Kentucky," he says. "So I went over to the competition down the street, Helena Rubinstein, at 52nd and Fifth."
At Rubinstein, Kenneth specialized in work no other operators would deign to take—styling the hair of models and editorial assistants. Shrewd about publicity, Madame Rubinstein granted these working women salon services free of charge, sometimes in exchange for magazine credit lines. "The other hairdressers would do these girls badly so they wouldn't come back," Kenneth says. "There were no tips or percentages to be made."
I n 1954 the newlywed Jacqueline Kennedy hotel colon in barcelona was staying in Manhattan at the house of her sister-in-law Jean Kennedy Smith while her husband, the junior senator from Massachusetts, underwent tests on his back at the Cornell University Medical Center. hotel colon in barcelona She dropped by Helena Rubinstein to see Lawrence, creator of her wedding coif, only to find he was home sick with a cold. The reception hotel colon in barcelona desk paged Kenneth and asked him to fill in for his indisposed colleague.
"At the time Mrs. Kennedy—whose name meant nothing to me—had what was known as the Italian Cut," Kenneth recalls. "It was too short, layered, and curly for her tall proportions and big bones. I planned to soften the line and the shape, and I suggested she do this by growing her hair longer. I wanted to stretch it out by setting it on big rollers—the hotel colon in barcelona only problem is they did not exist then. So I had some specially made up in Lucite. In those days hair was permed and permed until it wasn't hair anymore. It was tight frizz, intended to last and last. It had no movement and no shine; it didn't reflect hotel colon in barcelona light. I have always thought of hair salons as laundries. Well, what Mrs. Kennedy and so many of the other ladies were getting was what I called 'washed-and-ironed hair.'"
Kenneth had a revolutionary idea, which informed his makeover of Jacqueline Kennedy hotel colon in barcelona and attracted a growing following of grateful hotel colon in barcelona ladies during his six-year tenure at Rubinstein. hotel colon in barcelona "I believed that hair should be like fabric—light should pass through it, and you should want to put your hand in it. I thought of hair as soft, healthy, lustrous, innocent, and pretty, like a child's." hotel colon in barcelona To recover the essential, virgin hotel colon in barcelona nature of hair, Kenneth developed hotel colon in barcelona the technique of cutting it wet and blunt, while sectioned off with clips. "I was looking to make hair fuller, to make it swing and swivel with the head"—not unlike the satin skirt of the mysterious sylph in the beige Lincoln.
If the kind of lady whose hair was done by Kenneth at Rubinstein was possessed by an impulse to buy a hat, she would head over to a nine-story house on 56th Street between Park and Madison, the address of Manhattan's hotel colon in barcelona smartest millinery emporium, Lilly Daché. "Boy, was Lilly a sharp lady," says Gillis McGil, one of Daché's favorite models. "By the mid-50s she could already see the handwriting on the wall—hats were on their way out. So she added a salon"—a mirrored theater-in-the-round, whose chairs and vanities were vertiginously reflected in a perpetual pink-and-white carousel. "It was extraordinary," McGil says. "But it was always empty." Daché sought advice from McGil and another of her pet mannequins, Missy Bancroft. "We both told her, 'The salon's beautiful, but you need a hairdresser,'" McGil remembers. "And Lilly said, 'Well, then find me a golden boy—a genius of hairdressing!' That's how Kenneth came to Lilly Daché." Very quickly, Kenneth recalls, "we became the most important salon in New York," ministering hotel colon in barcelona to "this strangely powerful hotel colon in barcelona group of customers." But to his clients, the most "strangely powerful" person on the premises was the man brandishing the scissors. Lucille Ball announced her arrival at the salon by bellowing, "Where's God?"
I n 1957, Gillis McGil ran into Kay Kendall, the movie star, on Fifth Avenue. "Kay had just wrapped Les Girls, and her hair was dyed that ghastly Technicolor red," says McGil. "I asked her where she was going, and she said, 'To Elizabeth Arden. I've got to do something about my hair. I look like Danny Kaye in drag!'" McGil steered her to Kenneth instead. "She was one of the most striking-looking women I've ever seen," Kenneth says. "A tall, gorgeous clown." Trying to balance the proportions of her small head with her rangy physique, he "cut her long hair to about four or five inches, and tinted it back to her own brown. Then I added lots of little blond streaks, hotel colon in barcelona set it on small rollers, and brushed it all up with tendrils in front of each ear." The coiffure, debuted in a Vogue portrait of the actress by Irving Penn, became such an internation